3 Free Personal Safety Apps That Can Call for Help

I’ve lived in “the big city” for all my life, and for the most part, I feel safe when I’m out for a night on the town. But traveling alone through certain areas, especially late at night, often makes me nervous. I’d feel a lot safer, generally, if there was someone there making the walk with me.

Thankfully, if you own a mobile device, you’re never truly alone. If you have an ongoing concern for your safety, there are personal safety services that offer live monitoring, connecting you to a 24/7 dispatch service for $12 – $20 per month. But if you just want a way to warn your contacts if you fail to check-in or otherwise need to send out an SOS, there’s no need to pay. Here are three great, free options for providing a little bit of extra piece of mind.

NOTE: If you believe yourself to be in a real emergency, your first line of defense should always be to contact emergency services at 911. No app is 100% foolproof, and cannot substitute for professional first responders.

bSafe

bSafe

Personal safety app bSafe, a free download for both Apple iOS and Android devices, contains an incredibly wide set of personal safety features. It can be used to privately alert friends that you’ve arrived at your destination, send info about your changing GPS location and even set up fake phone calls to slyly escape uncomfortable dates and similar situations.

When you need real help, bSafe offers an audible alarm and immediately starts broadcasting video captured by your phone and your GPS location. Information is continually collected and recorded, and is sharable with police should it prove necessary to do so. You can activate the alarm manually or you can use the Follow Me Timer mode, which which will automatically send an emergency SOS message if you don’t check in before the timer runs out. This is great for late nights or a little extra safety on your morning run when you only want to disturb people in an emergency.

The one drawback is that friends and family you designate as your guardians all have to load the app and create a bSafe profile. You can learn more about bSafe and download the app by visiting getbsafe.com.

Kitestring

Kitestring is a bit different: It’s a web-based service that checks in with you and sends an alert to pre-selected contacts should you fail to respond. Kitestring works through your inaction.

Kitestring check-ins are sent by SMS text, so the service works even with feature phones – you simply need to visit the free service’s website at kitestring.io. Once you have your phone set up, you can visit the Kitestring site to customize your SOS message and activate an SMS message broadcast that will be sent out in 30 minutes, two hours, five hours or 12 hours. Or, you can simply text the Kitestring service with the number of minutes in which to active your SMS broadcast. Once the time is up, you get a check in message and if for some reason you’re unable to respond to that text within five minutes, Kitestring will let your contacts know. You can even set a check-in word and duress codes, so Kitestring will keep working even if someone else gains control of your phone.

You can learn more about Kitestring by visiting its website at kitestring.io.

Samsung Galaxy S5’s “Safety Assistance”

Samsung

The new waterproof Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone has a lot of great new features. One of these, called “Safety Assistance,” is a built-in emergency tool that lets you quickly notify pre-determined contacts that you may be in immediate trouble.

You can enable and configure Safety Assistance by tapping Settings > Quick Settings > Safety Assistance > Send Help Messages. Once the feature is turned on, you can send an SOS alert by pressing your phone’s lock button three times. Sent information can include a map of your location, photos from your phone’s front and rear camera and a brief voice recording.

It’s important to note that Samsung’s Safety Assistance feature isn’t a means of contacting 911 (text-based 911 doesn’t go live until May). You should also be aware that poor network conditions may delay or block these alerts.